We hope that this is not what's passing for scholarship in the social sciences nowadays:
Religious belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today. According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems. The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.
It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.
Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its "spiritual capital". But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.
The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: "Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world. In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so."
Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions. He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.
The study concluded that the US was the world's only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from "uniquely high" adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.
Mr Paul said: "The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America." He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.
Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. "I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states," he added.
He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.
"The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. "The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted."
I wasn't aware of it, but apparently those pious Christians fervently worshipping in their churches on Sunday morning and poring over copies of The Purpose Driven Life are also leading secret lives of murder, mayhem, and sexual promiscuity the rest of the week. I also never realized that devout Christians lead the world in suicide. Looks can be be very deceiving, apparently, and we will henceforth be reluctant to sit in the front of the church lest one of those homocidal maniacs in the pews behind us suddenly pulls out a gun and starts filling the sanctuary with bullets.
On the other hand, has there ever been an academic study more counter-intuitive, more self-serving, or more simple-minded than this one? Mr. Paul commits the fallacy of assuming that because there's a correlation between high dysfunctionality and high levels of religiosity that therefore religion is not beneficial to national social health. It's a bit like arguing that because the U.S. has a high incidence of cancer and also has high numbers of doctors that therefore doctors are not really beneficial to our nation's well-being.
In order to prove his bizarre conclusion Meyer would have to show that the set of dysfunctional people is identical to the set of religious people, but this he does not do. It is far more likely that the two sets scarcely even overlap in this country, in which case the results of his study are meaningless.
He also misses the mark when he conjures up an alleged widely-held fear that "a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster" in order to show that the putative fear is refuted by his study. The problem with a non-theistic citizenry, however, is not that it must experience societal disaster, but rather that it is far more likely to. A citizenry that lacks a transcendent ground for moral values, human dignity and human worth, must eventually either acknowledge that these things really don't exist at all or invent some fiction in which to ground them.
Either way, such a society will gradually become increasingly more cynical, skeptical, and nihilistic. Government may keep the wheels on the wagon with legal duct tape for a couple of generations as the religious bolts that fasten them to the axles work their way loose, but it's quite likely that when the bolts have all fallen out, the wheels will spin off too. That it hasn't happened yet in some European countries (Though see here) means only that the masses have yet to realize the full implications of their abandonment of the transcendent.
Indeed, in those European nations where authorities have sought to work out the full logic of their atheism and where they have possessed the power to impose their will on the masses - nations like the Stalinist U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany, for example - societal disaster is precisely what we have seen.
Mr. Paul strikes us as an atheist who aspires to prove that atheism is beneficial to society. If so, his work is still ahead of him, because this silly study certainly gives no one any reason to think that he's made his point.
For a technical critique of Paul's work by a statistician go here.